


the haircut

by spacemagic



Series: a selection of sunless dreams [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Gen, or rather: avoid dealing with feelings, trashlord father has to deal with feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-14
Updated: 2016-02-14
Packaged: 2018-05-20 14:01:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6009853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacemagic/pseuds/spacemagic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vader dies. And Anakin wakes up again. But the force is lost to him - and most people he knew no longer exist. He doesn't like that at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the haircut

**Author's Note:**

> I'm having a lot of trouble with the fifth chapter of ['requiem for a collapsing star'](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5888410/chapters/13571707) currently, a fiction about strange, contemplative dreams that could have occurred in the moments as Vader died. 
> 
> This fiction is a version of that chapter that I didn't decide to use because it didn't particularly fit - tonally, in many ways it's a lot darker. I really do like it though, so I edited it a bit and have stuck it up here as part of a series. 
> 
> It's designed to work as a stand-alone fic, so reading 'requiem' is not a requirement. 
> 
>  
> 
> **content warning for discussion of suicide and mentions of self-harm.**

The last thing he remembered was dying (again) by being torn apart (again) by someone he trusted (again).

He deserved it (again).

He woke up sudden in a military bunk, standard issue, morning klaxon at his ear, half a dozen no-name bunkmates calling him ‘Ani’. He’s not sure if they’re clones or imps or regular ol’ pre-imperial navy. Their faces are all fuzzed up, barely there, a murmur in the static. Amusing how it shaves off all the details off when you know it’s all a dream.

He drags himself to the ‘fresher whilst everyone else runs off to do jumping jacks (green as a garden world, must be). Lens glare and the light flickers. He feels ill. Tired, so very much. He looks at the mirror expecting nightmares.

He can’t be more than nineteen. Hell. He still has all his limbs here.

He closes his eyes. He tries to touch the force.

Ah. That explains much.

He glances at his reflection again – tries to crack a smile, the half-smirk half-snark sort that might have graced the face Ani Skywalker, hotshot pilot in the making, your regular flyboy, yes sir, no kooky space magic mumbo-jumbo here, nope, no sir, no mystic forces of prophecy behind this pretty face, nothing behind it, nothing to miss –

His fist smashes into the mirror too fast.

Nightmare.

(There’s blood. Some fragments. Everything’s too fuzzy to feel – to see – to breathe right – in and out in and out he can’t stop – how do people _handle_ this mess?)

He’s still retained his temper.

‘Darth Vader,’ he says to this stranger’s face.

It sounds lopsided on this tongue – nobody had stripped the outer rim out of his accent yet.

He briefly considers jumping. He’s on an orbital station. He wouldn’t be the first; procedure mostly involves erasing the record (good). And not the first time or the last time he’s wanted to die either. He thinks about the exact details – burn his possessions. no sentiments left. A feigned malfunction at the airlock. A single note: ‘Sorry.’

Without a doubt, nightmare.

He holds in a shiver – and just washes his hands.

He decides to stay in line for about a week before his squadron leader fires his ass for ignoring regulations enough times. His fault. Mostly to do with breaking formation. Discipline, he’s old enough to handle; he just decides it’s not worth sticking around.

He picks up the first shuttle to Coruscant with less than a handful of creds that he hasn’t earnt. Picks up odd jobs. Flies. Drives. Smuggles tzai spices around the back reaches of the outer rim. Sometimes he fixes engine parts. Sometimes he breaks people’s limbs. Makes things. Breaks things. Freelance work, mostly – none of it legal. He spends his spare time trying to sleep in an apartment buried between children screaming and stilted traffic on the six lane flyway by the window. He tries to call his mother. No response.

(He can’t find his wife. He looks at the hands that killed her and knows it's probably for the best.)

He considers a hobby. He makes a list of things he wouldn’t usually do but would half-heartedly try. Like gardening. Or a drinking problem. He looks for flowers that his daughter would have worn on her wedding day. They all die four weeks later. He contemplates the drinking problem after that, but is doesn't get the chance when he decides he'd rather lock his freighter onto a crash collision course with a dying star. He dies as the ship is torn apart.

A tragic accident.

He wakes up in the bunk again, as if no time had passed.

_Shit._

It's a nightmare. It has to be a nightmare.

He begins to devise more inventive and explosive ways to die. A city-wide fire. A five-way starship collision. A prison break. A terrorist attack (amusingly, that one was a complete accident; he was a bystander). A planetary bombardment by hostile forces. He learns how to rely on his hands and to hate the word 'again'.

It becomes rather tedious, eventually.

One day he wakes up naked in a bathtub next to a body bag somewhere on Correlia – he’d decided to try his hand at contract killing, thinking it little better than a suicide pact, underestimating exactly how well-practiced he is at killing people, when in reality he’d far more likely be murdered for twenty-six months of overdue rent – when he considers mutilation. Self-imposed torture techniques. He forms a mental checklist of limbs he’d be willing to cut off, non-lethal and lethal firearms that would best be suited to causing pain. Fingers: yes. Toes: yes. Wrist to elbow. Knee to Thigh. Nose. Lips. Cheeks. Tongue. He’d need a good selection of knives.

He rules out asphyxiation. That almost amuses him.

Leaning into his reflection, he washes the blood out of the sink. Cold eyes. Limp, messy blond hair, tumbling past his shoulders. He’d always wanted to grow it out. Still too young.

‘Who are you, kid?’

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, holding no direct answers as usual. This wasn’t exactly out of character, wasn’t so far from himself, in another universe – he had a flair for dramatic displays of self-destruction and this was the nihilistic continuation of it. The person who was once Darth Vader. He considers that this is an elaborate form of punishment for his previous deeds, a rather self-indulgent display of merciless self-pity that he finds particularly abhorrent for whatever reason, when it strikes him that on the level of affective empathy, he simply doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about anything.

He picks up a pair of scissors lying on the sink. He considers what he could do with these. Without the force, he’s keenly aware of the limits of this physical form, of this weak body. What he could crush with his bare hands. What he could tear open that should remain closed.

There is no peace here. There is no passion, either.

He’s empty. Like a suit.

He thinks of his son (he isn’t here). Fatherhood isn’t something he’s ever particularly understood. He is not sure he could have ever held him as a child, cradled him, without crushing the smile out of his body. He wonders if he ever knew exactly how to love – whether he’s any closer to understanding.

He thinks of his daughter, too (she isn’t here either). He thinks of those flowers that she could have worn – would she braid them in her hair? Or would she keep them in a bouquet? He doesn’t know. He barely knows her beyond a classified file. He can’t attend her wedding. Some things are beyond fixing.

He closes his eyes. It's still not there. Perhaps he should re-consider the drinking problem. It had worked for Obi-Wan.

The scissors still weigh in his hand.

He shrugs.

He decides to cut his hair.


End file.
